Europe emerges from the 'peace process' dark age

Well, it’s finally happened. The
European Union, Israel’s largest trading
partner, has finally moved to leverage that
relationship in the interest of changing
Israel’s colonial behaviour. News broke
yesterday of new guidelines for trade between
the EU and Israel. The EU directive instructs
“all 28 member states”, forbidding
“any funding, cooperation, awarding of
scholarships, research funds or prizes to
anyone residing in the Jewish settlements in
the West Bank and East
Jerusalem.”

This has been a long time in the
making. The Europeans have long been frustrated
with Israeli intransigence and have gotten
tired of being asked to merely fund a
Palestinian Authority - whose objective was to
transition to a Palestinian state - while
Israel continued to colonise Palestinian
territory, making reaching that goal
impossible. For years, the Europeans deferred
to American requests to be patient and allow
American mediation to move the situation
forward. Indeed, American mediation has only
moved the situation backward.

The EU decision is as much a
slap in the face of Israel as it is a slap in
the face of Washington. It is but the latest
result of the widely held belief that American
mediation is incapable of producing results
when it comes to Israel-Palestinian peace. The
message from Europe to Washington and Israel is
simple and clear: we will not sit idly by as
Palestine is gobbled up by
Israel.

The global civil society
movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
(BDS)
has had increasing success in recent years.
Boycott initiatives have perhaps been the most
prevalent. Divestment initiatives have also
succeeded and are growing. Just yesterday,
TIAA-Cref, a massive financial services
provider with nearly $500bn in assets, divested
holdings in Sodastream, an Israeli company
based in occupied
territory.

Where the nascent BDS
movement’s successes have been most limited is
in the “S”, securing state level sanctions. Of
course for a civil society movement to change
state level policy is always a difficult task
but some successes have come in the form of states
labeling or refusing to import Israeli
settlement products.

The announcement
from the EU, however, is an important step in
the right direction. How effective this step
will be on its own, however, is another
question.

If Europe did in fact cease all
trade with Israeli settlement products and all
investment in Israeli colonies in the West Bank
- and this new directive stops well short of
that still - it would make a dent in the
Israeli economy. That dent, however, would not
be very big, but it would send a
message.

The trouble of
course is the Israeli settlements did not
create themselves. They are part and parcel of
a statewide initiative to colonise what is left
of Palestinian territory. As I’ve explained
before, targeting the settlements alone is not
the way to change the behaviour of the state,
the state must be targeted as well. Or, as
Israeli columnist Gideon Levy put it recently
in a column endorsing the boycott of Israel
:

“The distinction between
products from the occupation and Israeli
products is an artificial creation. It’s not
the settlers who are the primary culprits but
rather those who cultivate their existence. All
of Israel is immersed in the settlement
enterprise, so all of Israel must take
responsibility for it and pay the price for it.
There is no one unaffected by the occupation,
including those who fancy looking the other way
and steering clear of it. We are all
settlers.”

The EU directive is a
preliminary step but a step in the right
direction nonetheless. While still far from the
pressure necessary, Europe is moving in the
direction of increasingly pressing Israel. By
starting this way, Europe leaves itself room
for incrementally increasing pressure on Israel
overtime to reiterate and reinforce the message
that continued occupation will be met with
continued sanctions.

Only by pressing
Israel will it actually change its behaviour.
This is refreshing to see, for a change, but
there is still a long way to
go.